January 10, 2010 - Bound for the bayou

Hey there, hi there and hello there to one and all. I had to step away from my TV for a bit before I threw something at my Packers, but hopefully they can pull it together for a comeback victory in Arizona ... fingers crossed. A happy birthday to a fellow Packer uncle Pat and Grandma Park ... hope you both have a great Monday birthday:)

It's amazing how much can be packed into a two day workweek, but it felt like we put in 5 days of work between Thursday and Friday ... 2010 is going to be ridiculous! I have one on one meetings with everyone on the team this year and we're all going to get together for New Years resolutions, should be something fun for all of us to keep tabs on each other ... at least for the next few months!

This week is going to be fun with the Literacy Alliance as I'm getting ready to take over the chair position. We have our first exec council meeting and then on Wednesday, I'm hosting new board member training. I think it should be pretty fun and the experience is going to be great! We also have a Young Professionals gathering on Tuesday evening, yup I got pulled in again with that organization. I'm helping them put together the Get on Boards workshop that we did back home with the ol' MMC SIFE team. I've helped four of my buddies on local non-profits over the last few months and I think this workshop will get even more young people involved.

Later in the week, 13 of us are packing up the cars and making the trip down to New Orleans to help them rebuild after the various hurricanes over the last 5 years. This will be my 4th trip to the bayou and the first few were all about demolition and clean-up while this trip is going to be centered on helping the New Orleans Habitat build new homes ... quite the 180 from a few years ago. We're staying at Camp Hope where everyone is very excited about the return of bunk beds:)

Welp, I'm off to make some spaghetti ... should be tasty indeed. I think that the start of 2010 should kick-start the weekly morsels. We'll start this week with a quote from Mitch Albom's "Have a little faith." It's a great book about discovering and reconnecting with your faith, and this passage was pretty powerful, "Maybe all you get are chances to do good, and what little bad you do ain't much bad at all." Take every chance you get to do good and those flashes of bad will be overshadowed indeed!

Alwayz,

Nate Klein